Dear Diane Kruger,
You’ve been in turns the face that threw a thousand ships, the Helen of the Most Hollywood Troy, a Marie-Antoinettewith tragic and contemporary lightness for Benoît Jacquot, a movie star spy for Quentin Tarantino or a police detective struggling with her demons for television.
Your elegance and the accuracy of your game make you a cosmopolitan and universal figure of cinema, as noticed in large productions as in auteur films. Rarely will an actress have so easily led a European and American career, permanently marking the minds and hearts of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, with popular films dear to the French as great successes of American cinema.
You love France and its cinema. You have become one of its great ambassadors and never fail to make it shine on the occasion of the Cannes Film Festival, when the Croisette only lives for the 7thth art. Master of Ceremonies of the 60th edition and then member of the jury in 2012, you are a regular of the red carpet that you enchant at each of your appearances.
In France and across the Atlantic, you have worked with filmmakers who have left their mark on their generation and with actors and actresses who are among the greatest names in cinema. After Neither for nor against (quite the contrary) by Cédric Klapisch, we see you in the first film by Guillaume Canet, My idolalongside François Berléand. In the same year, we find you at the Narco Gilles Lellouche with Guillaume Canet, Benoît Poelvoorde and Zabou Breitman Troy with Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom. After sharing the screen with Josh Hartnett for Meeting in Wicker Park, you join the team of Merry Christmas by Christian Carion and then by Tiger Brigades with Edouard Baer and Clovis Cornillac. You then give the reply successively to Ed Harris in Beethoven’s student, Joseph Fiennes for the moving and impactful Goodbye Bafana, Richard Gere in Hunting Party, Nicolas Cage in Benjamin Gates and the Book of Secrets and Vincent Lindon in For her sake.
After the success ofInglourious Basterds and your acclaimed foray into the quirky and cult universe of Quentin Tarantino, you reveal your ability to play everything and capture all the registers: of the poetic utopia of the very aesthetic Mr Nobody to the action taken and panting ofState of shock with Liam Neeson. But it is the French cinema that then seems to have your favors and offers you in return some of your most beautiful roles.
For his Farewell to the Queen, Benoît Jacquot chose you to embody the fascination of a world unconsciously running to its loss, and whose pomp is counted. After filming you in your element, modeling and the world of fashion, and as a victim of its paradoxes in Frankie, Fabienne Berthaud gives you a role full of gravity and grace. Making one of the most luminous and moving portraits of the relationship between two sisters, carried by a formidable duo that you form with Ludivine Sagnier. We also discovered you, biting and funny, torturing with a lot of humor Dany Boon in A perfect plan or as a hilarious nurse in Boys and Guillaume at the table! of Guillaume Gallienne. These roles – counter-employment - have revealed your comic vein and a disarming sense of self-deprecation that no one suspected you, thus surprising the French public to better conquer it.
Because the format of the series seems to you to do justice to the nuances and the thickness of the characters, you play Sonya Cross, a complex and endearing young woman, confronted with the shadows and the human darkness in The Bridge, a fiction whose dark realism has political overtones.
A talented actress, you are also a true muse, muse of the greatest designers and the most prestigious houses, Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel, Louis Vuitton to mention only the French houses for which you seem to have a special affection. Karl Lagerfeld made you one of Chanel’s faces and you inspired Jason Wu with a bag that bears your name. If you stopped modeling to pursue your career as an actress, you never gave up your first love, however, swapping the podium for the red carpet.
From big productions to auteur films, from Hollywood to Paris or Cannes, you embody the diversity and vitality of the 7th art. Ambassador of French cinema and elegance, you contribute to the influence of our country and its cinema while occupying a special place in the heart of the French public.
Sie lieben Frankreich, und Franckreich liebt Sie. Mit Ihnen, sehr geeherte Diane Kruger, unsere französishes Kino hat eine Botschafterin gefunden. Mit Ihnen, unseres Land hat eine neue Muse. You love France which makes you happy. With you, dear Diane Kruger, our cinema has found an ambassador and our country, a new muse.
Dear Diane Kruger, the Republic of Arts and Letters, whose creativity and influence you carry with such strength and grace, pays tribute to you today.
Dear Diane Kruger, on behalf of the French Republic, we present you with the insignia of Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters.
Dear Michèle Fitoussi,
You are among those who, through their commitment and talent, have paved the way for generations of women. A model of activism and creativity, you have brought the cause and voice of women to all fields - political, economic, cultural and social - always in search of new spaces for freedom and equality: from the press to television, from literature to theatre, to the net.
Your commitment is primarily that of a journalist and writer, in the pages of a magazine that has, since its creation, accompanied the struggles of women and their emancipation.
For 30 years, a great reporter and columnist for ELLE, you embodied its founding spirit. You have travelled the world to investigate the status of women, in Cambodia, China, Russia and elsewhere, while going to meet those who make the world today, Hillary Clinton at the White House in 1996 and more recently J.K. Rowling, The woman with 400 million books sold.
Together with Valérie Toranian and Marie-Françoise Colombani, you wanted to give a voice to women, 40 years after the first Estates General organized by ELLE, which carried high the demands of the French women. For this second edition, chaired by Simone Veil, you travelled throughout France.
Noted author of the I’m sick of Superwomen, you have been part of all the struggles – parity, quotas on boards, the glass ceiling – and have made your pen your most formidable weapon. A voice for the voiceless or those who have lost it, you trace the destiny of these women, models of courage, creativity and entrepreneurship, who inspire and guide us every day. After the success of The prisoner, Acclaimed across the Atlantic by Oprah Winfrey for the moving testimony of Malika Oufkir, you dedicate a magnificent work to Helena Rubinstein, «the woman who invented beauty». An entrepreneur, a pioneer who gave women the right and the means to make themselves beautiful.
It is to another pioneer that you have devoted your last work, The Night of Bombay, to be released in the coming days: Loumia Hiridjee, designer with her sister Shama of the brand Princesse tam.tam which revolutionized the lingerie industry and the daily life of women. An icon of French success, whose personal destiny mingled with that of an entire country and was broken one day in November 2008 by the horrors of history and terror …
It is in the cultural field that you decided to continue your commitment because, as you often have the opportunity to remember, “culture, or rather power in culture, is very masculine.” Today, as you notice, women are in the spotlight and it is to two of them that the Republic pays its respects!
With Anne Rotenberg and Véronique Olmi, you create the Paris des Femmes, a theatre festival dedicated to playwrights with a large E, which gives full space to original creation. You stage texts by writers and playwrights who look at the world through feminine and feminist variations around masterpieces – men! - from literature: Wars and peace, Noise and fury, Life ways of working and this year, The best of the worlds. With the participation, for this new edition, of Amélie Nothomb, Lydie Salvayre or Nina Bouraoui but also of the creator of Don’t do this, don’t do that, Anne Grafieri. Last year, Karine Tuil or Delphine de Vigan carried out the exercise, adding their contribution to what is now a true – and unprecedented – anthology of the playwrights.
You admit it bluntly, you’re a geek ! The Delegation to the French Language will forgive me this anglicism, I know that it is working to offer us an equivalent in the language of Molière... A computer always on standby, a reader in the bag, thumbs and eye on your laptop, you’re a bit like your Superwomen ultra-connected, but - I hope - without the nervous breakdown!
Fan of TV series, you created for France 2 the hilarious Bureau des affaires sexistes with Isabelle Nanty. And since talent is passed on to you from mother to daughter, it is with your daughter Lea that you now work… on a web series with the evocative title «The day I told my mother».
Addicted to social networks, you have seized the web and its possibilities, inviting women to appropriate the digital economy that allows them to bypass, overcome and even destroy all the blockages in our society.
Dear Michèle Fitoussi, for your many struggles on behalf of and for women, for the fair and committed portraits you make of all our modern heroines, for your ability to highlight the talents of yesterday, today and tomorrow, The French Republic, whose values and principles you defend with such inspiration, strength and generosity, is paying tribute to you tonight.
Dear Michèle Fitoussi, on behalf of the President of the Republic and by virtue of the powers vested in us, we make you a Knight of the Legion of Honour.